"Spend a year not releasing useful software" was never a part of the plan I helped make.

I know #perl6 has its own culture and vocabulary, but outside of the echo chamber "distribution release" doesn't mean "a wad of code thrown over the wall from a bitrotting and abandoned branch", "usable" doesn't mean "download the latest revision from the new master branch not called master and hope it passes tests", and "ready" doesn't mean "sure, it has thousands of commits along side its plenty of regressions, and if you're willing to idle on an IRC channel every day, you can probably keep your program running. Probably."

I don't necessarily disagree, but I can look at it from a far more relaxed point-of-view.

It's unfortunate that Star hasn't been able to move past its "early adopter" status yet, but as I'm only interested in Perl6 for curiosity's sake... *shrugs*

Take a look at Rust, another emerging programming language:

They just released version 0.1 - "an alpha release, suitable for early adopters". According to Wikipedia, development started in 2006, Mozilla got involved in 2009, and last I looked they are still changing language semantics left and right.

Some things just take time to get right, even if we'd like it to be otherwise.

Some things just take time to get right, even if we'd like it to be otherwise.

That's fine; I know this to be true (I worked on Perl 6 for eight years).

Yet I'd be equally as tough on Mozilla if they had a history of throwing away working code just as it's in most danger of being useful while claiming that it's both "useful" and "usable". I don't expect dramatic and rapid progress, but I do expect an accurate assessment of the project's state. If you can't (or won't) support real users, be honest about it.

Is that so much to ask?

I'm only interested in [Perl 6] for curiosity's sake...

I don't blame you. After all this time, it's sad that that's about the most positive thing I can expect. I certainly didn't volunteer time and effort for so many years to produce a curiosity. I wanted to use it, but there you go.